>TEC does deal with much more than Apple's character sets, but even if it
>handled MacIrishGaelic, Netscape and IE might not support it.

The Mac Gaelic and Mac Celtic character sets were released in the Irish
localization of System 6.0.7 and 7.0.1 years and years ago. Last time I
looked, however, Apple mappings for these (which I had provided) were not
on the Unicode CD or the Unicode site. Why not? Same goes for the Mac Inuit
character set now being used (and blessed by Apple Canada) 0

>We've had a full Unicode rendering engine in Mac OS since Mac OS 8.5 (with
>full Unicode input support as well), but applications haven't been revised
>to use that yet. That will come in time.

Not a single one? Not Simple Text? What's the mechanism for entering
characters? (You need something like PopChar at least and probably a nice
ResEdit interface for designing KCHRs.

>There is currently no documentation on how to create
>tables for the low-level converter; I think it would be a Good Thing to
>have, but I don't know when we will be able to produce it.

Sigh.

>When I was desperate for a Unicode text editor a few years ago, I wrote a
>little Java application that used TextArea to put up an editing window. It
>will read and write UTF-16 files. I'd be happy to send it to you if you
>like.

Well, I'd be happy to look at it... Is UTF-16 OK for HTML documents, though?

>Apple's Macintosh Runtime for Java (MRJ) does use every installed
>encoding when converting, so if you had a MacIrishGaelic table in TEC it
>would work. However, that puts us right back in the same situation of
>needing to create one of those. And it still might not display in IE
>(definitely not in Netscape).

Argh.

>In summary, while applications are starting to have support for UTF-8, I'm
>not aware of any downloadable freeware or shareware applications that
>support UTF-8 text files. And having to support Irish Gaelic is a problem
>due to lack of support in TEC.

Considering the size of the Apple plant down in Cork, and the enthusiastic
support Apple receives from Ireland.... what could we do about that?

>All of this would work great if applications
>supported our Unicode rendering engine (ATSUI), but such applications aren't
>available yet.